Consumer evaluations of health care are now being collected with question modules constructed by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR), along with a consortium of the Harvard Medical School, RAND, and Research Triangle Institute. This effort is known as the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS). The CAHPS common core questionnaire lists a) problems with health care providers that are asked int he yes/no response format, and b) positive interactions with health care providers that are measured using the never, sometimes, usually, always format. The present proposal is to use CAHPS field-test data to demonstrate the value of a new measurement model for comparing health plans with respect to these consumer evaluations. A major feature of this model is the capability of combining yes/no and graded responses into a single indicator. In addition, this item response methodology solves two other problems daunting the construction of survey indicators, i.e., differentiated item discriminations in an indicator, and correlations among questionnaire responses to the items in that indicator. The solutions to these problems are made possible are made possible by recent statistical advances in categorical data analysis. This type of analysis converts item response counts into parametric measures of consumer evaluation. The higher standard attained by these measures stems from their optimal statistical properties and the verifiability of the model on which they are based. This higher standard will improve the quality of health care monitoring with the continuation of the CAHPS survey analyzed here.